In general, human note takers are often used to take notes during conference calls. But manual note transcription comes with a number of problems. First, small businesses often cannot afford to hire people specifically to take notes. Secondly, human note takers can become overwhelmed as the size of the conference call increases and it can become challenging, if not impossible, for human note takers to re-create an exact transcript of the data file. Moreover, as the size of the business increases, note takers can represent a large overhead cost.
Currently, one method for automating note taking is simply to provide an audio recording to the conference call. In some cases, however, some, if not most, of the information provided is not needed by all the conference participants, thus, creating a large audio transcript of the conference that is largely useless to many of the conference participants.
In some methods, the entire conference call is transcribed to a purely textual transcript. But pure text sometimes does not reflect the nuances of speech that can change the intended meaning of the text. Additionally, the size of the transcript can become quite large if one is created for the entire conference.